Here’s a bit of an embarrassing confession: I have seen the K-pop girl group Twice every year for the past four years. None of those times have been in the broader San Francisco Bay Area. I have paid real American dollars for flights and tickets to see Twice in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago.
Last weekend marked my second trip to Chicago to catch them, but my first time at Lollapalooza.
While my colleagues saw the Dead & Co. at Golden Gate Park, I paid a cool $200-ish to see Twice at Grant Park. Clairo, Marina, and the Argentinian duo Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso were excellent cherries on top. I don’t regret a thing. The Twice show was two hours of pop showmanship — nonstop vocal theatrics in tandem with robust, choreographed dances perfectly synced between the nine members for nearly every song, with only a 10-minute breather for the group and crowd. (I was croaking by the end of the night from cheering so much.) There were fireworks shot out for basically every other song, and when they weren’t performing, they put on a drone show, a tie-in to the wildly successful Netflix animated film K-Pop Demon Hunters, which features Twice on its (also wildly successful) soundtrack. It was a glorious spectacle, a showcase not just of my favorite girl group (and my bias) but of Korean soft power’s stronghold in America.
I bring this up not to boast or celebrate the total mainstreaming of K-pop to anyone who will listen. Far from it: I bring this up because Outside Lands is missing something this year. That thing is probably K-pop.
Three-day passes for Outside Lands have yet to sell out, not a great sign for a massive festival about to kick off. You could write that off as the one-two punch of “the economy is in shambles” and “Outside Lands has never been as expensive as it is now.” But, given that Dead and Co. packed the park for three days straight and Lollapalooza sold out of full-fest passes within an hour of dropping, the lukewarm sales for OSL strikes me as less about the money than the show.
If Another Planet Entertainment wants to fill the park, they need to reach deep into fandoms rather than rely on artists who’ve played every festival on earth. Almost every Outside Lands headlining act has done another American festival earlier this year; hell, Hozier, Tyler, the Creator, Gracie Abrams and Doechii did Lollapalooza. As with Dead & Co., they need to super serve the diehards. And no one — well, except maybe the Deadhead faction and Swifties, too, please don’t get mad at me — is more diehard than K-pop fans.
I have a theory as to why Outside Lands is cold on K-pop, while just about every major festival has embraced its fandom. The girl group Aespa was the first K-pop act to ever grace Outside Lands in 2023. (Note the byline.) But the show was treated less like a main-stage celebration and more like a tossed-aside experiment in inclusion. Aespa was given a brief afternoon set on a side stage, and the set was hampered by technical difficulties and the fact that one of its four members was out sick. (Also a factor: Aespa had yet to blow up stateside; it’s a bit like if Chappell Roan performed at Outside Lands last year without the buzz of ”Good Luck, Babe!”)
Was it a perfect set? No. Do the fans still talk about it two years later? You’re reading about it right now.
K-pop fans will travel to the ends of the earth for their favorite groups. My Lolla sojourn notwithstanding, there was also a little thing called KCON last weekend — a 100,000-strong convention-slash-music festival of every rising K-pop group brought into downtown Los Angeles.
As it stands, there’s really no reason for anyone to travel to San Francisco for this year’s festival. In all honesty, I don’t know anyone else who’s going either. There’s just not enough that sets it apart from any other music festival stateside. It’s a bummer!
I can almost guarantee that I’m not the only person in San Francisco thinking about this either: On my flight back from Chicago Monday, I spotted a guy passing through my aisle wearing a cap with Twice’s logo on it, a literal fellow traveler. I wonder if I’ll see him again at Outside Lands. Somehow, I doubt it.
